


In/Visible Coffee

by aba_daba_do



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Gen, missing fathers, sibling relationships
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-18
Updated: 2018-09-10
Packaged: 2019-06-29 06:11:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15723588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aba_daba_do/pseuds/aba_daba_do
Summary: Cecil decides its time to talk to his sister Abby, but in doing so finds himself on a journey to learn more about his father and where he disappeared to only to find that people are disappearing all over Night Vale.





	1. The Moonlite All-Nite

Cecil sat down at the back booth in the Moonlite All-Nite Diner. The lights from the neon sign for the Desert Flower Bowling Alley and Arcade Fun Complex shone through the dusty window in blasts of yellows and pinks. Cecil dropped his bowling bag at the foot of the booth, it was bowling night at Desert Flower and he figured he meetup with his team as soon as he was done at the Diner. 

The waitress came by with the many branches extending from her chest, plump fruits hanging over the table. “What will it be?” She placed a hand on her hip and waited. 

Cecil looked up at the menu plastered to the wall. “Visible strawberry pie, please. And coffee, also visible.” 

The waitress nodded and grabbed one of the plump fruits that hung from her branches with her equally plump fingers. She dug her fingernails into the firm, rubbery skin, picking up flecks of the membrane and letting the juice seep out. She crushed it in her hand, sticky, red, juice dribbling down the back of her veiny hand and raw insides of the fruit expanding in her palm. “Your order will be right up,” she replied and walked away. 

Cecil leaned back in his chair, the vinyl padding squeaking beneath him. The door chimed again, a figure walking into the diner. She showed the hostess her Diner Access and Patronage card and walked towards the booth where Cecil was. She stopped in front of him, leaning her elbow on the back of the seat. “Cecil.” She looked tired, both in her body and in the rest of what lingered of her existence. 

He nodded, “Abby.” Cecil realized he should probably talk to his sister more, so he did. She slipped into the seat across from him, just as the waitress brought out the visible strawberry pie and coffee. 

The waitress looked to Abby. “Anything for you?” 

“Just invisible coffee.” Abby replied. The waitress crushed another fruit in her hand and walked back into the kitchen.  

Cecil scoffed, reaching for his fork and digging into the first slice of strawberry pie, catching it before it could run away. “How can you like invisible coffee? It tastes awful.”  

“It’s good and it’s got less calories than visible coffee. Steve makes good invisible coffee, you know. He grinds it up himself, the aroma in the morning bakes against me like the sun on the desert sand.” Abby nodded to the waitress who brought her invisible coffee over. “Are you and Steve getting along better?” 

Cecil shrugged and bit into another piece of pie. “Things are… things.” Since Steve defended the angels, Cecil had warmed up to the idea of his brother-in-law. Their differences were still numerous, but Cecil was learning to get there. 

She sighed into her coffee. “It’s important that you two get along. For Janice. She loves you both so much.” 

“I know.” Cecil hung his head low like a guilty child about to be punished. “Steve tries to be a good father to her. I respect that.” 

Abby grabbed a stirring stick from the caddy at the end of the table, two sugar packets, and a clump of dry grass. “He _ is  _ a good father. He takes care of her and loves her.” She dumped the ingredients into her coffee and stirred. Then she licked the remaining specks of sugar that lingered along the edge of the torn packet. 

It was wrong to say that Cecil hadn’t talked to his sister. He had and often. But usually she called about Janice, coming to her basketball games or letting her spend the weekend at his apartment with Carlos. But Cecil could not recall the last time he and his sister talked about them. It had to have been a few months before their mother died. He didn’t even know what to talk to Abby about. The most recent corporate takeover? Fashion trends? The weather? 

He took along drink from his coffee, draining it nearly down to the bottom where the little legs could be seen sitting at the base. “Do you remember anything about our father?”

Abby put the coffee to her lips, paused a moment, and put it back down. “I was 5 when he left.” She looked out at the lights from the Desert Flower breaking through the dirt on the window. “But I remember a little bit.” She finally drank from the coffee. “You sound like the way he did in my memories, low and baritone, but memories are faulty and altered by the government. So I may be wrong. Maybe I’m just told to believe that you sound like him.”

“We could check the Department of Altered Memories,” Cecil said. 

Abby shook her head. She had hair that was a little like Cecil’s in texture and a face that was a little more like his in the cheeks and jawline. Though, she looked more like their mother than he did, or a version of their mother who was healthy and not chipped at by years of alcohol. That meant that Cecil must have looked more like their father, but he had not looked in a mirror since he was 15 after their mother warned him not to. So he could only suppose this was true. 

“There’s too much paperwork and ceremony that goes into that. I don’t have the time and all with Janice and my work. Maybe when she’s a little older I will have the time.” Cecil agreed with this. Having a life requires time to perform it’s basic duties. He too was wrapped up in the radio station and trying to spend quality time with Carlos. 

“But,” Abby continued, “I do remember him debating back and forth with the Community Television hosts one night, even though it was the middle of the night. He used to throw me up onto his shoulders so that I could see the homecoming parade and wave to all the hooded figures.” Abby set down her coffee, realizing that she had still been holding it, using her pinky to cushion it against the table. She tucked the strands of loose hair that flung around her face behind her ear. “I remember when you were born and mother and father came home with you, wrapped in the animal skin that father had gone out and killed with his teeth in celebration.” 

Cecil pushed around the last chunk of strawberry pie on his place, his fork scraping against the metal. “Do you know why he left?” 

“No,” the word passed like a moth between the electric rungs of an insect zapper. “But I don’t think it was because of you, if that’s what you want to know. He was happy when you were born, Cecil. That I do remember.”

Cecil rested his cheek on his hand. “I wish we could ask mother. I can’t believe we never asked her why he left.” 

Abby finished her cup of coffee. “She had her secrets. That plus the alcohol, she would have never told us.”

Pushing away his plate, Cecil felt a slight rise of nausea bubbling in his throat. “I never said thank you, did I?” he asked. 

“Thank you for what?” 

“Dropping out of school, taking care of me when mom left. I never said thank you. It must have been hard, and then having Janice all on your own. Steve is a good dad, but you’re an amazing mom.”  

Abby didn’t say anything. She sat still in the booth, letting the world exist around her. She brought her eyes down to Cecil’s abandoned plate with the few chunks of strawberry pie left on it. “Are you going to finish that?” 

“No.” He pushed the plate closer to her. 

Picking up the forth, Abby brought the last bits of pie to her mouth and chewed. “You see, invisible pie just doesn’t cut it for me. Invisible coffee, sure. But pie? You can’t change pie.” 

Cecil laughed, “Finally, something we can agree upon.” 

Abby reached into her purse, grabbed a small glass figurine of a dog, and let it drop from her fingers to smash against the table. She took the pieces one by one with a long extended finger to count them. Then she rose from her seat and grabbed her purse. “It’s time for me to go pick up Janice from practice.” She opened up her purse, pulled out some cash to cover her coffee and set it out on the table. “And Cecil,” she said, “this was nice. We should talk more often.” 

“We should.” 

Abby wrung her hands up and down the strap of her purse. “Okay. Bye.” She turned and walked out of the diner in a brisk movement of her legs and feet while keeping her upper body stiff as a board. 

Cecil slumped back against the seat and huffed out a breath. He dug into his pocket, pulled out some cash to leave on the table, grabbed his bowling bag and left for the Desert Flower Bowling Alley and Arcade Fun Complex. Though as he walked, he glanced behind him at the empty pie plate sitting in the soft glow of the neon lights. 


	2. In Pursuit of the Scientific Method

Cecil hung outside the Desert Flower Bowling Alley and Arcade Fun Complex. Through the window he could see that the game was in full swing. The angels who were all named Erika (and were now legally recognized as angels) lined up a ball while Teddy Williams talked about how he knew for sure the insurance check would come to help pay for the damages from the underground war (though everyone was sure it never would). And yet, Cecil stayed outside. He pressed his back against the brick exterior and sighed. The neon lights outside stood eerily still, hovering in a patch of sandy haze. He dug his phone out of his pocket and dialed Carlos. The tone only lasted a few seconds before Carlos picked up.

“Hey, sweet pea. What’s going on?” 

Cecil could already feel the sweat from his face slip down the phone. “Hi, honey bunch. I just have a quick question. Which do you prefer. Invisible coffee or visible coffee?”

“Visible coffee,” Carlos answered. “The notion of coffee being invisible is scientifically--” 

Cecil cut him off. “Yes, scientifically implausible. I love it when you talk science but that’s not really the point right now.” 

“Is everything alright? Are you planning some sort of coffee statistic for the station?”

Cecil switched ears on the phone. “I just met with my sister at the Moonlite All-Nite.” 

“Oh yeah, that was tonight. How did it go?” Cecil could hear Carlos shuffling through papers and something beating like the faint wings of a baby bird that had fallen from its nest in the background. He must have still been in his office. Carlos was always in his office when he wasn’t with Cecil. 

Cecil paused a moment. “It… went...” How embarrassing. He made his living speaking to people and now he couldn’t even tell Carlos about the meeting he had with his sister. “It went well.” 

“You sound unsure.” 

“We talked about my father. No one has ever spoken about my father before, other than I had one and that he is gone.” 

“I see.” The paper shuffling stopped on the other end of the line as Carlos thought. “What did she say?” 

“That she remembers very little. And that she prefers invisible coffee.” Carlos remained stuck in the fine grain static between the phone and Cecil. Behind him, in the Desert Flower Bowling Alley, the angels had just bowled a strike, by knocking over all the pins with their feet, and howled into the air with a deep and throaty glee. “Do you have any siblings? I’ve never asked about your family.” 

“No,” Carlos said matter-of-factly. “I am an only child and my parents died when I was a younger man. I miss them. But I am a scientist and I recognize that parents die, sometimes when we are very young. That’s just the scientific nature of things. But I have you now. And I have Night Vale.” Carlos let out a breath that crackled into the phone. “I don’t have any siblings, but I think that you and Abby should follow the scientific method to learn more about your father. Curiosity is the basis of science.” 

“The scientific method?” Cecil asked. 

Carlos chimed into the phone. “Oh yes! The scientific method is a series of steps a scientist must follow in order to pursue an answer. The steps are:

  1. Ask a question
  2. Scream your question into a jar
  3. Bury the jar 
  4. Do background research 
  5. Test your hypothesis 
  6. Unearth the jar 
  7. Inhale the scent of your question 
  8. Draw a conclusion 
  9. Suffer with your new knowledge.” 



“That does sound very scientific,” Cecil responded. 

“It is. You and Abby need to follow these steps and it may lead you to a conclusion about your father. Where he went or why he went. And then you both can talk to each other more. This could be good for our family.” Cecil loved the way Carlos said “our family”. That their being husbands allowed them to share more things than a house or a marriage rat that lived in their closet reminded them to pay bills or write little notes about how much they loved each other. 

Feeling the sweat stick to the side of his face, Cecil switched the phone back to the other ear again. “I’m sorry I could never meet your parents.”

“I’m sorry I couldn’t meet yours either. But I am still very happy. I gained a family I had thought I lost through you.” 

Cecil smiled, his breath fogging against the phone. “As I you.” He looked back into the window of the Desert Flower. “I should go. It’s bowling night. I’ll see you at home.” 

“See you at home.” 

Cecil hung up. He turned to enter through the doors of the bowling alley, sliding his phone into his pocket. Then he changed his mind, taking the phone back out and sending a text to his sister. _Meet me at the station tomorrow during my break. I want to know more about dad._ He crammed the phone back into his pocket, scooped his bowling back off the ground and went to join his league.


	3. Mysterious Disappearances

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cecil and Abby discuss their plans to find their missing father, but the problem has grown much bigger.

Cecil’s lips hovered just near the black mound of the microphone. The air smelled like old carpet and stale metal. “The glass shatters. A woman screams. This has been traffic.” A rapping came from the glass that divided him and the sound booth. Abby stood on the opposite side, tapping her fingers against the glass. Cecil nodded to her and cleared his throat. “Forgive me, listeners, but there is someone in the studio who is here to see me. How about I turn your attention to the weather?” He pressed a button to the right that switched his voice to the pre-recorded weather report and slipped the headphones off. 

He pressed through the door that divided himself and the rest of the studio to confront his sister. “Thank you for coming out here.” 

Abby cocked her head towards the recording booth. “You didn’t want to tell Night Vale that your sister was here?” The ON AIR sign casted a soft red glow on her cheeks. 

“My personal life is no one’s business.” 

Abby scoffed, “Your personal life is everyone’s business. You never stop talking about Carlos, or Janice, even Steve. But you don’t talk about me.” 

Cecil shrugged. “We don't talk as much as we should.” 

“We’re talking now. What's all this about wanting to know more about our father?” Her voice blazed over the muffled pre-recording of the weather. 

“It’s in my journalistic nature to uncover the truth,” Cecil replied. “I have decided to follow the scientific method in order to find him.” 

“The scientific method?” Cecil watched the hard lines of his sister’s mouth. She was doing that thing again, where she was angry with him but too intrigued by what he would say next to do make any signal that she was angry with him. 

He produced a piece of paper with Carlos’s perfect, curled handwriting on it detailing the process. “Yes. It is the method by which science is done. I've already asked a question, whispered it into a jar, and buried it. But I need your help for the next step.” 

“Which is?” 

“Do research. You are the only person still alive who remembers our father, even a little. But also because you are my sister and we should find him together. This is for our family.” 

Abby sighed. “I would like for Janice to know about her grandfather.” She ran her fingers through her hair and then down her neck, the way Cecil did. “Ok. Let's do it.” 

Station management growled and clawed at the bottom of the door to the sound booth, making it rattle and swell against the pressure. Abby jerked around to see as Cecil scrambled back to the recording booth. “That’s my sign that the weather is over! I’ll call you later? Okay?” He slammed himself down into a wheely chair and rolled towards the mic, fitting his head phones back on, and leaning up to it. “Sorry listeners. That was my sister Abby.” His voice clung to the static of the microphone. He peered at her through the the glass between them, as she turned to look at him as she passed through the door. “She and I are working together to learn more about our father, which should be fun and interesting.” She smiled, tucked the hair behind her ear, and left. “Back to the news. The City Council has advised not to panic about the sudden disappearances. ‘People randomly disappear all the time,’ they said. ‘Your loved ones are probably just on vacation. We are on vacation right now. Please do not disturb us on our vacation. We are trying to relax’.” 

 

 

Cecil closed the front door behind him and tossed his keys onto the entryway table. “Carlos? I’m home.” He shrugged off his enormous tweed poncho and hung it by the door. “Carlos,” he called again. He shuffled across the floor, peering around bends of the wall and into darkened rooms. 

The light in Carlos’ home office shone yellow and casually warm down the hallway. Cecil grinned to himself and leaned up against the doorframe. “Hey, snickerdoodle, I--” he stopped. There was no one in there. Certainly, there someone had been in there. And that person was Carlos. His notes were spread out on the desk, the science box in the back of the room had been turned on, and a glass of water sat on the edge of the desk, ice still rattling inside. 

Cecil took a step back. “Carlos?” He dug his phone out of his pocket and tried to call, but no voice ever answered. He scoured the house again, and again. But still no Carlos. 

“He was here,” a withered voice called from the coat closet. The Old Woman Who Secretly Lives In Your Home, poked her head through the clump of raincoats and shoes and long black cloaks. “But not anymore.” 

Cecil groaned, “Yes. I am aware of this. Do you know where he went.” 

“He didn’t go anywhere.” 

“But you just said he’s not here anymore.” 

“Yes, but he didn’t leave.” 

Cecil’s phone rang in his pocket. He scrambled for it, waiting to hear Carlos’ sweet voice say that he had gone to the supermarket for dinner, or had been randomly selected for forced interrogation that night. But when he looked at the caller ID, it wasn’t Carlos. It was Abby. He answered it. “Hello?” 

“Cecil!” she screamed, her voice huffing and straining. “I can’t find Steve or Janice anywhere! I came home and Janice’s wheelchair was there but not Janice! I can’t get in contact with Steve. I--” she wept into the otherside of the phone. 

Cecil’s heart dropped down to his stomach. “Carlos is missing too.” 

“Do you think something happened? The Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in your home said--” 

“Yes I know what she said,” Cecil eyed her, still nuzzled into the closet. She grinned at him, all wrinkles and teeth. “But think about the announcement from the city council today!” he said, trying to raise her spirits. “Don't panic. People just sometimes disappear. I'm sure all of this will be over soon.” Usually things were over soon. But the person who often fixed things, was Carlos. And now he didn’t know if there even was a Carlos. 

“Screw the City Council, Cecil!” she shouted. “My daughter is missing without her wheelchair! If Steve and Carlos aren't with her then she is helpless! We have to find them!” 

“It's okay,” Cecil said. Things were definitely not okay. It had been a very long time since Cecil and Abby had a real conversation, and now it had come to the point where they were the only ones left to comfort each other. In fact, Cecil hadn't heard Abby cry since their mother left. “We can go to the Hall of Missing Persons. Everyone needs to file a report if they want to go missing, right? They can tell us what happened.” 

“Alright,” Abby sniffled. Cecil inhaled to keep the tears from touching his cheeks. He was a journalist. And journalists are good at keeping their emotions out of the problem. 

“I'll come pick you up and we can drive down together. Just hang on, okay?”

She muttered something back to him and then hung up the phone. Cecil stood with his back against the front door, before sliding down it in preemptive defeat. How could he fix this without Carlos? Carlos was the expert on things that disappear, things that do and do not exist. Even Steve knew a lot about the government and mysterious pre-planned happenings. Cecil was just the radio host. He gathered information, but he never discovered it. 

He buried his face into his hands, unable to convince himself to stand up and get his car keys. The marriage rat skittered up to his feet, leaving a clump of fur and viscera as a sign that the end of the month was coming and rent would be due. He let a hot and heavy breath pulse against his hands. 

“How nice is this,” said The Old Woman Who Secretly Lives In Your Home. “It’s about time you and your sister spoke with each other. I personally like it when people disappear. It gives me an opportunity to reconnect with what really matters, and go through their drawers and find their secrets.” 

Cecil ignored her, rising to his feet with an unsteady fumble. He scooped his keys off of the table and stumbled towards the door. His drive to Abby’s house, which was opposite Night Vale High School and next the Parks, Recreation, and Wartime office, consisted of turning the radio off even though the schedule called for the sound of your neighbor’s dog barking at 3 a.m. (one of Cecil’s favorites). He found her sitting on the front porch, only one of the lights was still on. Mascara drooled under her eyes and her feet shifted idly in the sand. She looked up at him, immediately wiping at the black trails that crept down her face. 

She grabbed her purse and stood up. Cecil had already gotten out of the car to greet her, and the siblings found themselves standing face to face. Abby hugged herself at the elbows, trying to hold on to one of the few things she had left before it disappeared too. “Abby--” Cecil said but never had the moment to finish his thought when his sister latched herself around his middle. Her spider-like fingers dug into the flesh between his ribs. Her face, hot and wet, pressed into his gauze shirt, leaving a stain of black mascara behind. 

Cecil pressed a hand to her back. “We will find them. No one is disappearing on us this time.” 


	4. The Hall of Missing Persons

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cecil and Abby go to the Hall of Missing Persons to look for their family.

Abby pressed the hollow space between her ribs and her gut up against the counter of the Hall of Missing Persons, which she had already completed the procedure of drawing runes across the base of her neck, wrists, and ankles in dark charcoal from a fire where she burned a piece of paper that said something important to her. “We’re looking for some missing people,” she said to the clerk. 

The clerk did not look up from his computer, which was only displaying a continuous loop of birds in a cage pecking at each other. “Aren't we all looking for the missing things in our lives.” 

“Files! I want to see the files!” Abby shrieked. 

The clerk sighed. “Did you go through our screening process first? I can't pull any files for you until you complete this process.” 

Abby dug her fabric pill caked nails into the strap of her purse. She slept in Cecil’s car that night, curled up in the back seat after finally succumbing to her human need and privilege for rest while Cecil found himself in the reclined front seat, unable to succumb to that same need and privilege. He stared at the mysterious lights that floated above the Arby’s through the windshield and at his sister in the rearview mirror, as her fingernails scraped up the loose pills of fabric from the backseat. The car smelt mostly like old fast food wrappers and the faint linger of Carlos’s shampoo in the seat. 

They had driven up to the Hall of Missing Persons immediately after meeting just to find that it had been closed, and that the security officer who had the keys mysteriously disappeared that afternoon and that it would take until morning for the replacement officer to come with the replacement keys. Neither sibling wanted to go home to empty houses, but the car was anything but empty and nowhere but home. Cecil partially regretted that, as the ridges in his spine beat up against the seat. But not matter where he spent the night, he wouldn’t have been able to sleep. 

“We completed the screening process,” Cecil said. He had burned a grocery list that Carlos left for him on the kitchen counter that was now to go uncompleted because there was no list and there was no Carlos to shop for. He rolled up his sleeve to show the runes painted on to his skin. 

“Very well,” replied the clerk. 

“Last names Palmer and Carlsberg.”

“And Carlos,” Cecil interjected. “He’s a scientist.” 

The clerk yanked open the drawer to a filing cabinet, the manila folders and papers bursting out like viscera from a wounded animal. He fingered through the files, some of them written in languages he could not understand. He shook his head and flung open another cabinet. 

Cecil put his arm around Abby’s shoulder, a strange intimacy he could not remember wanting to do but certainly did anyway. “Janice is a good girl, she would never go anywhere intentionally without filing a report first. She files her reports before going to school or basketball practice every single time without fail.” Of course that meant, if the file was not for Janice, that she did not go anywhere intentionally. But that she was forcibly taken.  

The clerk slapped a file on to the counter. Cecil expected the sound to be more dramatic, like the ending crescendo of a song played only on multiple sets of drums. Instead it was only like the faint tapping of a birds wings on the palm of your hand. “Nothing for Carlsberg. There is one for Palmer,” said the clerk. 

“Janice!” Abby said, pressing a hand to her chest. 

“Actually it's for a Lionel Palmer.” The clerk flipped open the file. One paper sat inside. 

“Our father?” Cecil picked up the paper between his thumb and index finger. “He wanted to go missing?” The paper fell weakened between his fingers. The information blacked out on the page, ink sinking into the backside. The reason for disappearance, the date and location of the public announcement of disappearance party (and would there be chicken wings-- as the city council does love chicken wings and would like to know). Nothing remained, just a name, and a date of disappearance. 

Abby braced the other side, pulling the paper tight. Her careful eyes scanned over it, her chapped lips moving but making no indication of sound or meaning. “This is from after he left us. Almost a month… he came back and he didn’t even tell us.” Abby’s eyes turned a pale but aching red. “I have no daughter, no husband, no brother-in-law, and now a father who did not even return to me.” 

Cecil took the paper back from her, turning the paper over in his hands. No matter how many times he looked at it, it still said nothing. “Are there no other records,” he asked the clerk. “Nothing about our father. Or our family?”

“No.” 

Cecil turned to his sister, looking between her and the paper. “Abby, if this report was filed after our father left… do you suppose that wherever he went is where Janice, Carlos, and Steve are too?”

Abby pressed her fingers to her lips, although so lightly that they could not stifle any sound that was about to protrude from her. Her words groaned in agony. “But we don’t know where he went. I was so young then, I don’t remember much about his leaving to even begin to think of where he went.” 

Cecil turned back to the clerk. “Is there any other department we can see? Repressed Memories? Government Interferences?” 

“Well, do you have anyone else you can ask about your father or your family?”

Then Cecil realized that he and his sister were alone for the first time since their mother died. “No.” 

“Then ask the Sheriff's Secret Police,” suggested the clerk. “Mentioning them will trigger their alarm systems to come and take you away to the Play Ball where they host most of their operations. Perhaps they saw something under the cover of night, while flying in their helicopter. They also have their secret files, which are very secret, that they will let you see if any of your family members were arrested for say bringing wheat or wheat-by-products into town.” 

Abby yanked the file from Cecil’s hand and crammed it in to her purse. “If the Secret Police have answers, then I will get answers.” She gripped her iron fingers around Cecil’s wrist, rubbing away the charcoal and leaving his wrist chaffed and red as her eyes. Cecil’s feet shuffled against the old carpet as his sister dragged him along. When she pounded through the doors into the hallways of City Hall, Abby let Cecil’s wrist drop. A sigh escaped her chest through her nose. “Do you really think this may have something to do with our father?” 

Cecil shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m a journalist, I should know. But I don’t. I do know that after decided to pursue our missing father the rest of our family goes missing. It is a weak lead, but it is the only lead I have. Sometimes being a journalist means not knowing something until you hit the end of the story.” 

Abby nodded, “Then we must figure out what happened to our father.” 

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote the first chapter of this with my fanfiction students, not expecting it to go anywhere. But here I am! You can find the original (spoiler free) version on my Wattpad aba.daba.do. 
> 
> This is also super weird because my name is also Abby.


End file.
